


June, July, August; just before the start of the beginning of the middle

by Pigsinspaaace



Series: Roommates AU [4]
Category: Simon Snow & Related Fandoms
Genre: Also some cynicism is expressed towards the profession and practice of psychiatry, So if that is a sensitive issue you might want to skip this one, but anyway this happens the summer before Baz and Simon meet, when is a prologue not a prologue?, when you start in the middle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-06-29 12:47:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19830544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pigsinspaaace/pseuds/Pigsinspaaace
Summary: Impatient inpatient Baz, the summer between Simon getting him kicked out of the dorms and Simon being assigned as his roommate when he was finally allowed to return.





	June, July, August; just before the start of the beginning of the middle

Baz kept his face carefully neutral, as he endured yet another earnest counselor doling out group-therapy-sized helpings of questionable wisdom. Currently, this consisted of extolling the redemptive virtues of forgiveness to the assembled 18-24 year old guests of the university’s student inpatient facility. 

This particular room of the damned had already completed a ridiculous exercise in mindfulness, in which they closed their eyes and listened to the world around them. But, because the world around them was separated from New York fucking City by a thin pane of glass, the sounds that they found themselves minding today included: aggressive horn honking, a kid crying, and what Baz decided was either two squirrels fucking or a new talking Elmo doll from FAO Schwartz, which glittered hideously just down the block.

All of which, in retrospect, was an unintentionally apt preface to the claim that if only he could forgive, the world would open itself gently before him and he would inhabit the same circles of light and love as the preternaturally well-balanced grad student leading the current group therapy session. 

The one whose internship was nearly over. Soon, she would leave, and a new grad student would take her place. The student patients would remain, while the student doctors escaped back to the world where psyches nestled themselves neatly between the pages of textbooks. Where their notes and observations on this flock of hopeless fuckups would bring them one step closer to controlling the keys to the kingdom: the right to prescribe meds.

Baz’s anger curled itself into a sharp fist. His hand, unfortunately, didn't have the same freedom. Perhaps that was for the best. Violence would only keep him here longer. 

Baz hated this bullshit world where the price of medication was the willingness to bare your pain and fear to a series of fucking strangers, who could then judge whether you were worthy of saving. Who could assign the penance of endlessly talking through your faults and failures in exchange for daily doses of neurotransmitters that could hold the dark at bay for 12-18 hours. Judge and jury, with the power of CPT codes and controlled substance waivers.

Self-medicating was infinitely preferable to the humiliating submission to the pity and stern encouragement of the smug humans playing at god. Or it had been, until some asshole got him kicked out of the dorm. Faced with the choice between living with his father and subjecting himself to the misplaced optimism of the medically inclined, he would choose the latter every fucking time. If “choose” could really be applied under the circumstances. Which, he was perfectly well aware, it could not.

He tuned back in when a short girl sitting a few seats over raised her hand to interrupt. He couldn't hold back a huff of disgust. The kid was new, but still. Raising her fucking hand? Was this primary school? And for fuck’s sake, even a new kid should be able to figure out that any interruption would only prolong this agony.

The girl’s face was earnest, too. Just what he fucking needed, more sincerity. He glanced automatically to the scruffy boy who'd become his eyebrow comrade. Strange bedfellows. But the boy looked rapt. Baz resigned himself to a worse day than usual. And then the girl spoke.

“What about when a person does something unforgivable?” Her voice was not what he expected. Not angry, not soft, not hesitant. More just… curious? No, not that either. He struggled to place it. It was a welcome distraction from the usual struggles that group therapy generated.

Then he placed it. It was academic. She was a college student asking a question, like this was a lecture. Like information was the goal, and truth could be debated. 

Baz felt an unfamiliar twinge of regret at the knowledge that she would lose that hope, and soon. This was purgatory, outside the usual back and forth of human discourse. This was the space you served your time until the inpatient gods decided you could eke out the rest of your existence outside the radius of their pointless focus.

The counselor paused, but only for a moment. Then, couched as a question, she reminded the girl that forgiveness was axiomatic here. Their task was to understand and forgive so as to free themselves from self-imposed torment. 

Baz allowed his attention to wander again. He was intrigued by the scruffy kid’s intense gaze. He lost track of time, watching the scruffy kid as the scruffy kid watched the earnest new girl. When Baz looked around again, he noticed that everyone was watching now.

Because the girl wouldn’t let it go. And he had misjudged. She wasn’t asking innocently. Or maybe she was. But she wasn’t asking kindly. She spelled out all the reasons that the call for forgiveness was itself a form of harm, a means of blaming the victim and returning the burden of survival to their shoulders.

Baz wondered why no one else had tried this before. He supposed it was because it was so obvious that it would fail. Surely it wouldn’t change the medical curriculum that had been carefully designed by committee to re-introduce the room of lost students back to their natural habitat. It wouldn’t change the minds of the clean, calm adults who navigated this space so transiently, yet with such certainty. 

So what good could it do? To question the belief that forgiveness brought salvation? They all knew that agreeing to forgive was just another thing they needed to submit to before they could be set free from this very particular prison. Empty words that were needed to open locked doors.

But now Baz wondered if there was another option. If there had been one, all along; latent, unnoticed. Not aimed at the pointless adults who swarmed above them, setting the rules. But a means to speak to one another around the adults. Across them, through them. Above them. A way to say no.

She spoke of poison and darkness and rape. The scruffy boy spoke of repression and domination and breaking. For a short time, the room buzzed. Voices he’d never heard whispered their hopeless, frightened thoughts. The grad student, uneasy at the onslaught of so much specificity, shifted the conversation back to the universal.

The girl, undeterred, tried again. Ceding to the forced shift away from the personal, she tried to speak of history, but then paused. Baz found himself, despite himself, filling in details. Dates, regimes, atrocities. Words floated across the room. Otherness. Passing. Erasure. The ugly side of the call to forgive.

The counselor looked relieved when the session was over. That was a nice fucking change.

____

Nothing actually changed, of course. Nothing ever changed. Change wasn’t even the hope. But it made new things visible, nevertheless, and that went a long way in these sterile gray-green halls.

____

Baz discovered he was wrong; something _had_ changed. (Being wrong was novel in and of itself.) He was wrong, because he discovered that he had started trusting the other kids in the group to sometimes provide a counterpoint to the ugly banality encouraged by the counselors. He was wrong, because he would start the conversations now, sometimes. Sometimes the girl was there. Sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes other kids would talk. Sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they were aware of what they were communicating. Sometimes they weren’t. But Baz was learning to see them.

____

The kids moved across the room, forward and back and forward and back, led by a dance therapist who thought this would help. Baz moved too, back and forth, tracing the circular path to freedom. Every adult had to sign off on release, before it could be attained. Baz dutifully used the preschool-issue magic markers pushed by the art therapist; sat through fifty-minute hours of mediocre sound prescribed by the music therapist; crossed the room, back and forth, again and again, to pacify the dance therapist.

____

His roommate cried in the bathroom at night. The girl who dared to withstand the call to forgive grew pale and thin, barely breathing in the dining room at mealtimes. One boy stayed camped out in front of the anachronistic bank of pay phones, necessary in this place where cellphones were the least of what had been taken from them upon arrival. This boy had brought an anachronism of his own: a sheet of paper, densely filled with phone numbers and pin codes. He would fill any space with phone calls, retreat when other people came by, emerge again when they moved on.

____

Baz saw them, saw all of them; saw their eyes empty and fill, out of sync with their words.

____

They could be speaking, but absent; or silent and present, communicating more with the tense set of their shoulders and the almost imperceptibly more shallow breathing of a self, held tight. 

Most often they were silent and absent.

____

But still, something was new. Changed. Sometimes, now, they would be speaking and present. Those were the moments when change lived in the charged air between them, around and (mostly) despite the earnest fumblings of the adults who thought they were facilitating the process.

____

Once, two of the kids commandeered an ancient VCR and tried to watch a movie. Actual laughter happened. The phones in the hallways rang. The phone boy answered them, and smiled. A woman in a head covering clasped the hand of a girl who was being discharged, gave her a cookie shaped like a triangle, and entreated her to pray.

____

A month passed. Two.

____

In the middle of the third month, Baz was free. On his hospital roommate’s bed, he left a sheath of archival quality paper and a sleeve of micropens that Fiona had brought him. To the pale girl, he bequeathed a secret stash of mint gum. For himself, he left with a cocktail of medications that seemed to ease the scraping agony enough that it seemed plausible, just possible, that he wouldn’t need to supplement them with anything else.

____

Baz discovered that this was something he wanted.

____

It was a relief to return to his violin; to his books; to steaming espresso and sitting outdoors. To trousers with belts; to proper pajamas; to food that required both a knife and a fork to eat. To campus, where he felt free for the first time in a long time.

____

It was enough of a relief to carry him to his dorm room, to face a year with a roommate of someone else’s choosing. He felt the relief flicker in the strangely hostile face of the stranger to whom he’d been assigned. He felt it die in the face of the discovery that somehow, impossibly, he’d been paired with the author of his exile. The exile that had in the end birthed the fledgling hope that was now, in a reverse reincarnation, being extinguished.

____

If there was one thing Baz hated more than forgiveness, it was fucking irony.

____

____


End file.
